February 15, 2022
It was thirty-four years ago today that Richard Feynman departed the physical world for the spirit world of our memories. Then, as now, the Winter Olympics were going on. Then, as now, the Lunar New Year (Shagaa in Tuva) was this month. Those similarities have intensified my reflections on his life and death. On this anniversary, I’d like to share a story that is not widely known.
Richard Feynman read his own obituary.
How was it possible that a man could read his own obituary? Here’s how it happened, as best I can remember.
It was sometime in October, 1987, that I got a call from LA Times science writer Lee Dye, who wanted to know if it was true that Feynman was near death at the UCLA Medical center—where he had just undergone his fourth surgery in eight years for abdominal cancer. I said that the doctors there tried a new technique for post-operative recovery that seemed to be working quite well, and that Feynman would be returning home in a matter of days.
Then I got an idea: thinking of Mark Twain’s reputed line “The report of my death has been greatly exaggerated”, I asked Mr. Dye whether Feynman’s obituary had already been written, and if so, could he show it to Feynman?
Mr. Dye said yes, and yes—as long as Feynman understood that no changes by the deceased are allowed.
Feynman thought that was fair enough, so Mr. Dye made a printout of the obituary (there was no email in those days), and put it in the mail.
A few days later, the obituary arrived. I took it over to Feynman’s house (he had just returned from the hospital), and he had a look.
It wasn’t long before he was shaking his head in regret.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
He pointed to the phrase “In the end, he seemed to devote almost as much energy to maintaining his image as a macho womanizer who loved a good laugh as to solving the mathematical mysteries which won him the Nobel prize…”
Now that I have had more than enough time to reflect on this, I can understand better my own contributions to the situation that caused Feynman’s regret.
I grew up around Caltech—my father (Robert B. Leighton) was a professor there. One of my big memories from the summer of 1960 was accompanying him to Mt. Wilson, where he was making dynamic photos of the sun at sunrise. While he took photos, I fed the local birds and chipmunks sunflower seeds. Around 7AM, when his observations and photography for the day were done (the atmosphere is calm only for about an hour after sunrise), we went to the cafeteria, dubbed “the Monastery,” to eat Swedish pancakes—a real treat!
There was a female astronomer doing research at Mt. Wilson, but I never saw her: for one thing, she was awake at night, and slept during the day. Still, she could have come in for “dinner” at 7AM while we were having breakfast, except for one thing: there was a rule that no women were allowed to eat in the “Monastery”. In that “scientific” establishment run by Caltech, a ten-year-old boy outranked a female astronomer with a PhD.
Caltech did not allow female students until 1970. (Today, 45% of undergrads, and 33% of graduate students at Caltech are female.) That means Feynman gave his legendary Lectures on Physics in a hall where only males were present, which enabled him to make jokes about a “lady driver” (who actually outsmarts the cop), and invoke similar stereotypes. And those stereotypes easily made it into print because none of the editors, nor the publisher, were women. (And perhaps it was expected at the time that few if any of the readers of a physics textbook would be women.)
When Feynman told his “adventures of a curious character” to me during the 1970s and 80s, it was a similar atmosphere. The editors for Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—both from the Caltech side and the W. W. Norton side—were men. This is how it was possible for Feynman to maintain his image as a macho womanizer: there were no women in the creative process, from recording and transcription through editing and publication, even though—had we thought about it—there would surely be female readers…
As this iniquitous situation began to dawn on me since the original publication of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, I asked the publisher to remove some of the more offensive stories—but the new editor (a woman, no less) advised me to keep them in: let the historical record stand, just like Feynman’s original obituary—to his regret, and mine, as well.
— Ralph Leighton
